Why under Stalin the counters were full of food and goods

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

This morning I listened to the background of the radio "Echo of Moscow", which clearly broke the template, or maybe the world outlook collapsed altogether. These guys discovered for themselves the fact that under Stalin, almost immediately after the war in 1947, counters and shop windows were full of food and domestic goods.

It was staged! - they argued. American journalists and photographers were given a show! So they think. I fully understand them, because in the imaginary world in which they exist, under Stalin there were only repressions and the GULAG, and people were completely dying of hunger. And the Americans publish this! This is American propaganda, they say. It remains only to sympathize with them, because the Americans showed only what they saw with their own eyes, and not the imaginary world of the continuous Gulag and the famine of Echo of Moscow.

And do not try to ascribe to me the opposite, that I, they say, assert that under Stalin there was heaven on earth, etc. Just in 1947 in the USSR it was rather bad with food, because in 1946 there was a post-war grain crop failure, which happened against the backdrop of a drought and a war-ravaged collective farm system. After that, the second serious crop failure after 1932 in the USSR, there was a noticeable supermortality rate of the population in the amount of 800 thousand people, and in the RSFSR it was equal to 400 thousand people. But at the same time, the counters were really full of a variety of delicacies, groceries and goods, which was shown by American photographers of Life magazine and photographer Robert Capa, who made a trip to the USSR in 1947 with the famous American writer John Steinbeck, who described his journey in the book "Russian diary". Therefore, let us give the floor to them:

The grocery stores in Moscow are very large; Like restaurants, they are divided into two types: those in which groceries can be purchased with ration cards, and commercial stores, also run by the state, where you can buy almost any food, but at very high prices. Canned food is piled up in mountains, champagne and Georgian wine are in pyramids. We have seen products that could be American too. There were jars of crabs with Japanese brands on them. Howled German food. And here were the luxurious products of the Soviet Union - large jars of caviar, mountains of sausages from Ukraine, cheeses, fish, and even game - wild ducks, woodcocks, bustards, rabbits, hares, small birds and a white bird that looks like a ptarmigan. And various smoked meats.

But they were all delicacies. For a simple Russian, the main thing was - how much bread costs and how much it is given, as well as the prices of cabbage and potatoes. In a good year, such as we got, prices for bread, cabbage and potatoes fell, and this is an indicator of success or a good harvest. In the windows of grocery stores and those with cards, models of what can be bought inside are displayed. On display are ham, bacon and wax sausage, waxy cuts of beef, and even wax jars of caviar.

We went to a nearby general store that sells clothes, shoes, stockings, suits and dresses. The quality and tailoring left much to be desired. In the Soviet Union, there is a principle of producing essential goods while they are needed, and not producing luxury goods while essential goods are in demand. There were printed dresses, woolen suits, and the prices seemed too high to us. But I would not like to generalize: even during the short time that we were in the Soviet Union, prices dropped, and the quality seemed to be better. It seemed to us that what is true today may not be true tomorrow.

John Steinbeck, unlike the current journalists from Echo, immediately understood the essence of the matter and the reasons for the abundance of goods on the shelves in Stalin's time and did not become indignant that he was given a show. And the essence of the matter is extremely simple, that in the USSR there have always been two types of pricing: market, at high prices and state, at low prices (or even products and goods issued by cards before they were canceled in December 1947). So he saw full shelves with goods at high prices, which are not available to everyone. You can also look at them.

As for the connection between full counters and full stomachs of people, there is none. Full counters speak more about the unavailability of these products or goods for people than about the abundance of goods, which we all clearly saw in 1992, when empty counters suddenly became full of food, and people began to eat less and die significantly more. It is strange that the adults from the Echo of Moscow radio do not understand such simple things.