Commodity deficit in the USSR, why there was not enough food

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

The food shortage arose in 1927 and has since become invincible. Historians name many reasons for this phenomenon, but the main one is only one.

State distribution

The Soviet government was able to end the Civil War only with the help of the NEP - "Tambovism", "Siberian Vandeya" and other uprisings showed that the Bolsheviks could not last long with war communism. I had to allow the people to return to market relations - the peasants again began to produce and sell their products themselves or with the help of the Nepmen.

For several years in the USSR there were practically no problems with food, until 1927 the markets were distinguished by an abundance of products and memoirists only complained about prices, but not about the lack of food. For example, V. V. Shulgin, traveling around the Union, described the Kiev bazaar of 1925, where “there was plenty of everything”: “Meat, bread, herbs, and vegetables.

I didn’t remember everything that was there, and I don’t need it, everything is there”. And in the state shops there was enough food: "flour, butter, sugar, gastronomy, in the eyes dazzled with canned food." He found the same thing both in Leningrad and in Moscow.

However, the NEP, although it solved the problem of food, was initially perceived as a “temporary deviation” from socialist principles - after all, private initiative means the exploitation of one person by another. In addition, the state sought to force the peasants to sell grain at low prices.

The natural reaction of farmers is not to hand over grain to the state, since the prices of manufactured goods did not allow them to give away their products cheaply. So the first supply crisis began - 1927-1928. Bread was scarce in the cities, and local authorities throughout the country began to introduce bread cards. The state launched an offensive against individual peasant farming and the Nepmen in an attempt to establish the dominance of state trade.

As a result, queues for bread, butter, cereals, milk lined up even in Moscow. Potatoes, millet, pasta, eggs and meat came to the cities intermittently.

Stalin's supply crises

This supply crisis is the first in a series of similar ones, and the deficit has since become permanent, only its scale has changed. The curtailment of the NEP and collectivization should have forced the peasants to surrender grain on any terms, but this problem did not solve. In 1932-1933. famine broke out, in 1936-1937. there was another crisis in the supply of food to the cities (due to a poor harvest in 1936), in 1939-1941. - another.

An excellent harvest in 1937 improved the situation by a year. From 1931 to 1935 there was an all-Union rationing system for the distribution of food products. There was a shortage of not only bread, but also sugar, cereals, meat, fish, sour cream, canned food, sausages, cheese, tea, potatoes, soap, kerosene and other goods that were distributed in cities by cards. After the abolition of the cards, demand was restrained by rather high prices and rationing: no more than 2 kg of baked bread per person (from 1940 1 kg), no more than 2 kg of meat (from 1940 1 kg, then 0.5 kg), no more than 3 kg of fish (since 1940 1 kg) and so on.

The next exacerbation of the deficit occurred during the war and the first post-war year (in 1946 the USSR experienced the last major famine). Everything is clear with its reasons.

Again it was necessary to return to the cards, which the government canceled in 1947. In subsequent years, the state managed to establish a food distribution system so that in the 1950s. even the prices of basic foodstuffs were falling; the peasants provided for themselves thanks to their personal household plots, and in large cities in the grocery stores one could even find delicacies, there would be money.

Required minimum

Urbanization, the decline in labor productivity in agriculture and the experiments of the "thaw" (development of virgin lands, maize, the attack on home gardens, etc.) once again brought the USSR to a food crisis. In 1963, it was necessary for the first time (and then regularly) to purchase grain abroad, for which the government spent a third of the country's gold reserves. The country, until recently the largest exporter of bread, has become one of its largest buyers.

At the same time, the government raised prices for meat and butter, which gave a temporary decline in demand. Gradually, government efforts have coped with the threat of hunger. Oil revenues, the development of international trade, and efforts to build the food industry have created relative food well-being.

The state guaranteed a minimum of food consumption: bread, cereals, potatoes, vegetables, sea fish, canned food and chicken (since the 1970s) could always be bought. Since the 1960s, the deficit, which reached the village, no longer concerned basic products, but "prestigious": sausage, in some places meat, confectionery, coffee, fruit, cheese, some dairy products, river fish … All this happened in different ways " get it out”or stand in lines. From time to time, shops have resorted to rationing.

The financial crisis of the mid-1980s triggered the last exacerbation of the food problem in the USSR. At the end of the decade, the government returned to the rationing system.

Leonid Brezhnev's assistant A. Chernyaev recalled that at that time, even in Moscow, in sufficient quantities “there was neither cheese, nor flour, nor cabbage, nor carrots, nor beets, nor potatoes”, but “sausage, as soon as it appeared, took away nonresident. " At that time, the joke spread that the citizens were eating well - "a clipping from the party's food program."

"Chronic disease" of the economy

Contemporaries and historians name a variety of reasons for the deficit. On the one hand, the government traditionally gave priority not to agriculture and trade, but to heavy industry. The Union was preparing for war all the time. In the 1930s, they carried out industrialization, then they fought, then they armed themselves for the third world war.

There were not enough resources to meet the growing food needs of the people. On the other hand, the deficit was exacerbated due to geographically uneven distribution: Moscow and Leningrad were traditionally the best provided cities, already in the early 1930s they received up to half of the state city fund of meat products, up to a third of fish products and wine and vodka products, about a quarter of the flour fund. and cereals, a fifth of butter, sugar and tea.

Small closed and resort towns were also provided relatively well. Hundreds of other cities were supplied much worse, and this imbalance is characteristic of the entire Soviet period after the NEP.

The deficit was aggravated by individual political decisions, for example, the Gorbachev anti-alcohol campaign, which led to a shortage of spirits, or the Khrushchev planting of corn. Some researchers also point out that the scarcity was fueled by the poor technical development of the distribution network: good food was often improperly stored in warehouses and shops and was spoiled before it hit the shelves.

However, all these are just side factors that arose from the main reason for the deficit - the planned economy. The historian R. Kiran rightly writes that the deficit, of course, was not a product of the evil will of the state: there have never been examples of a large-scale planned system in the world, the USSR conducted grandiose experiments and “it is quite natural that in the course of this truly innovative and gigantic work of the pioneers there were many problems."

Now it seems obvious everything that few understood then: the private trader copes with meeting demand more efficiently than the state. He responds faster to changing consumer needs, takes better care of the safety of food, does not steal from himself, distributes small batches of goods in the most convenient and cheapest way … In general, he successfully does everything that a bulky and slow state apparatus is physically incapable of. Officials cannot take into account the million little things that make up overall well-being.

They forgot to put something in the production plan, miscalculated the needs, they could not deliver something on time and in the required volume, they plundered something along the way, somewhere vegetables were not born, competition does not stimulate a creative approach to business … As a result - scarcity: shortage and uniformity of goods. The private trader, in contrast to the bureaucrat, is interested in satisfying the demand, and not just reporting to the authorities.

In the early 1930s, when the state subjugated the market (although it could not completely destroy it), only the most perspicacious of the communists realized this. For example, the People's Commissar of Trade Anastas Mikoyan, who at some point advocated the preservation of private initiative.

In 1928, he said that suppressing individual peasant farming means "taking on enormous obligations to supply a new scattered circle of consumers, which is completely impossible and makes no sense." Nevertheless, this is exactly what the state did, and the deficit, in the words of the historian E. A. Osokina, became a "chronic disease" of the USSR.